GeoMaker - Turning web content into maps made easy (Yahoo! Developer Network Blog)

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YDN YDN Blog GeoMaker - Turning web content into maps made easy

Yahoo! Developer Network Blog

July 1, 2009

GeoMaker - Turning web content into maps made easy

Yahoo! offers some cool tools that let you play with web content and enrich it with geographical data. Placemaker finds geographical information in texts or web addresses and lets you display the new-found information on maps. All of this is pretty easy to use for those who love to deep-dive into code and play the API game on the web.

As preparation for an upcoming tech talk about Placemaker I thought I'd have a go at making this a whole process a bit easier. A day sick at home, a dash of YUI and some PHP later, you can see the result: GeoMaker. In just three steps you use content to create a copy-and-paste map to include in your pages. Check out the following screencast to see GeoMaker in action:

As you can see, adding the website address as a URL parameter can shorten the process: http://icant.co.uk/geomaker/index.php?url=http://news.yahoo.com. Another nice-to-have: getting the locations marked up for you as Geo Microformats.

I'd like to get your feedback and once everybody's happy, the source code will be made available on GitHub so that you can host it yourself.

Chris Heilmann
Yahoo Developer Network

Posted at July 1, 2009 6:34 PM | Permalink

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Comments

Chris,

Neat idea.

I tried this out on the following text: "I was driving on I95 from Fort Lauderdale to Hollywood when I saw a car on the highway that looked like my uncle. Fred London went to the Florida Keys. Next I went to Aventura."

It picked up Fort Lauderdale, Florida Keys and Aventura.

It correctly knew that Fred London was not a place. It did not pick up Hollywood as a place. And it put the marker for the Florida Keys in the wrong place.

Posted by: ryan teixeira at July 2, 2009 2:01 PM

How interesting. This application could probably give a visual aspect to a text like we were driving from here to there or I was born there, but my family moved here when I was such and such age. What if the text is not specific enough. There is more than one result for st.andrews for example. Should a developer consider using the whole text in order to pinpoint the location or give all the possible locations for st.andrews.

Posted by: Love at July 4, 2009 5:45 AM

Good post. Thank you for let me know this.

Posted by: Hebe at July 30, 2009 5:31 PM